Let's Watch the Teaser for "Dinosauria"

So this looks incredible:

Animator David James Armsby loves dinosaurs and has been hard at work on a series of five short films about life in Cretaceous North America.  And so far they look amazing.  I can't wait to see this in full!

Bill Maylone's "64,000,000 Years Ago"

I love a good stop motion dinosaur as much as the next person but goodness look at this lovely short!



"64,000,000 Years Ago" is a wonderful showcase of dinosaurs from 1981.  It's therefore right smack in that weird era when pop culture was just starting to catch up with the then-still-kind-of-new "wait, maybe dinosaurs weren't big dumb failures" theories.  And I love every minute of it, but especially the bullying, cock-blocking(!) Tyrannosaurus.

The animation is by Bill Maylone and it looks incredibly familiar, like I'd seen this footage used in another dinosaur video.  The only other Maylone animated shorts I can find (and they are both delightful) are a surprisingly stressful woolly mammoth short and "Catapult Through Canada".  If anyone remembers an educational short where a Gastornis pounces on a Hyracotherium, let me know.

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Art of the Day!



I can't believe it's September already...

The 25 Weird Days of Christmas Day 25: Lotte Reiniger's "Post Early!" and "Star of Bethlehem"

Here's something genuinely, seriously cool for Christmas Day -- but still delightfully weird:



Now, I really hope I don't have to explain who Lotte Reiniger is here. While these shorts don't quite have the full majesty of her "Prince Achmed", they are very nice indeed.



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Art of the Day

You know what Father Christmas could use along with new boots? A giant robot buddy.



I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy, healthy, safe, and creative new year.  See you in 2016; hopefully my cousins and I will be going to see "Star Wars" (again?) so hopefully we'll kick off the year with a review.

Glen Keane's "Duet"

I've probably mentioned before that Glen Keane is one of my art-heroes.  A few weeks ago, seemingly out of nowhere, he dropped this beautiful short on the animation community.  It's called "Duet" and good lordy is it ever gorgeous.





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Sketch of the Day!

This is why Book-Stuart Little is a way, way better character than Movie-Stuart Little.

Okay, let's talk about how freakin' adorable the new Mickey Mouse shorts are.

Because that doesn't really demand much elaboration.  All of the new Mickey Mouse shorts released so far are indeed freakin' adorable.  Here they are in a (hopefully region-free) official playlist.  Now this is how you effectively revive a classic character.  See how easy this is, Warner Bros.?



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By now it's Punch-a-Climate-Change-Denier-in-the-Face Hot, which means it's time to think of this year's summer series. I'm still debating what it's going to be, and rest assured I do eventually wish to do all of these ideas, the question is, which do I do first?

* - Jurassic Park Revisited: This would be me reading the original Jurassic Park novel from 1990 on my trusty little Kindle, and (hopefully) figuring out a way to share passages from said trusty little Kindle.  Passages that are now very strange after twenty-three years of paleontology marching on and that I will make (again, hopefully) hilarious comments about.  While, naturally, respecting the memory of author Michael Crichton.  Who, infamously, was a bit of a climate change denier.  Awkward...

* - Defending the Disney Princesses: In the (not exactly) immediate wake of Princess Merida getting her cheeks liposuctioned and having a vat of glitter dropped on her, I revisit the films in which the Disney Princesses debuted and voice my dissent about the way these characters are currently marketed.  See, one of the most frustrating fallouts from the Disney Princess thing is how utterly divorced these characters are from their original films and their original personalities.  To the point where otherwise reasonable adults -adults old enough to have loved many of these movies in childhood mind you- are remembering them wrong.  I want to try and set the record straight.

* - My Summer (or Autumn?) in "Fraggle Rock": It's remarkable that I haven't done this one yet!  This would be very like the DC Animated Universe retrospective from WAAAY back in the early days of this blog (anyone remember that?  Cause I didn't...)  Except this time I'd have the good sense to discuss significant episodes at length.

That right there doesn't look like a bad schedule.  Of course I'll also have the not-at-all-annual Animated Trailers post and Random 90's Animation reviews whenever any of the remaining films become available.  And I could probably stand to write something about the live-action Disney movies I've been watching, but this will be after I fill in all the gaps in my live-action Disney knowledge, because it turns out most of the classic live-action Disney films I've watched aren't as interesting to talk about as I thought they'd be.

Until then, here's this week's Sketch of the Day!  I don't think I've shared these magical peeps yet?

In Which Another Obscure, and Very Strange, Disney Animated Short Finally Surfaces

Sadly, the Disney studio has the nasty habit of either owning the rights to or creating really awesome animated content and then essentially burying them.  The periodic "vaulting" of their classic animated features is the most infamous example of this, but there is a lot of much more unusual Disney animation that has never even had the chance to see the light of day outside of maybe one Oscar-qualifying theatrical screening or something.  Once in a blue moon, one of these resurfaces online, and that is an occasion the entire animation fandom should celebrate.

One such animated short was finally posted on YouTube by it's director, Steve Moore, last week.  Now imagine you are a director and the leader of Disney's television animation team asks you if you would like to create an animated short film that parodies a famous fairy tale -- and that you can have complete creative free reign?  It sounds improbable, especially for Disney in the mid-90's, but that is essentially the situation a stunned Steve Moore found himself in.

The result is "Redux Riding Hood", and it is very definitely one of the very strangest animated shorts to ever bear the Disney name:



Steve Moore tells the complete story of "Redux" on his blog, and it's a worthy read.  Rumor has it that this was going to be a part of a series of fairy tale parodies directed at an older audience; a project that was later abandoned after only one other film was created.  That sadly leaves "Redux" a one-of-a-kind oddity, and unless Disney finally releases the "Lost Disney Shorts" DVD compilation I suddenly need like I need water, it'll never find a permanent home.  Then again, "Redux" has been steadily building a cult following so we can dream...

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Sketch of the Day!

Speaking of weird Disney things...

In Which Trish Impulsively Joins the Short Animation Blogathon Party

So the idea, started by the Pussy Goes Grrr blog, is to pick a number of animated shorts that you like that can all be viewed in under one hour.  This is going to be hard as hell.

To make this very slightly easier for myself I will focus only on Warner Bros. animation since (a) I haven't had much opportunity to share my adoration for Looney Tunes and (b) my foggy memory has a better grasp on my favorite favorite Looney Tunes cartoons.  Anyway, the math will be much easier to do since each Looney Tune is about seven minutes and my Gold Collection discs are right here on my desk.

I am just going to list (and hopefully find links for) the first excellent animated Warner Bros. shorts that come to my mind.  Please don't read too much into this list and PLEASE don't fill the comments section with, "But what about...?"  Those will only make me feel horrible for forgetting/not having room for a favorite.  So without further stalling...

"Duck Amuck" (1953, Chuck Jones) - This might be my absolute favorite cartoon of all time if I am forced to pick one.  I only wish I could have been in the theater audience the day it premiered.  See, nestled in a compilation on Saturday morning, this short was hilarious but also kind of mind blowing.  By then I was already used to characters breaking the fourth wall and even engaging in meta-commentary about the nature of their being animated.  God knows what people in the early '50s thought of it.

"Feed the Kitty" (1952, Chuck Jones) - Sometimes straight-up adorable is just as good as mind-bending.  Anyone who watches this and does not go "Awww" even once has problems.

"What's Opera, Doc?" (1957, Chuck Jones) - You cried when Bambi's mother died?  Ffft!

"Waikiki Wabbit" (1943, Chuck Jones) -  My favorite among the more stylized Chuck Jones shorts, and nearly all of them ("Dover Boys", "Hair-Raising Hare", "Haredevil Hare", "Super Wabbit") are awesome.  The backgrounds are just so pretty!

"The Great Piggy Bank Robbery" (1946, Bob Clampett) - This is getting a little Jones-heavy isn't it?  So let's have a few adrenalin shots to the heart care of Bob Clampett.  I'd be in a happier place if more comic-to-film adaptations were like this.

"Baby Bottleneck" (1946, Bob Clampett) - Clampett Daffy is the best Daffy.  The animation in this short is just straight-up screamingly funny, plus the baby characters are adorable.

"The Heckling Hare" (1941, Tex Avery) - In the last, like, minute and a half we get a genuinely cute and moving moment and then... you can't not love that finale.  Avery thought Different.

"A Wild Hare" (1940, Tex Avery) - And sometimes you have to go for the obvious.  There had been cartoons with clever rabbits and hunters getting way in over their heads thanks to aforementioned clever rabbits before.  But this is where the legend really began, if we want to get all highfalutin' about it.  And let's leave that for the Disney animation.

More Animation Marathons

* - The Chronological Disney Animated Canon

* - Don Bluth Month

* - Dreamworks' "Tradigitals"

* - The Short Animation Blogathon

* - My Summer of Sequels

* - Random 90's Animation

* - The Princess Project

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Sketch of the Day!

The Internet needs another drawing of Yutyrannus, doesn't it?  Keepin' that beard meme alive.

Bob Clampett of Mars?!

So apparently Robert Clampett of all people (and as an aside, I have not shown enough love to him on this blog which is downright embarrassing) approached Edgar Rice Burroughs in the 1930's to make an animated feature film based off of A Princess of Mars. Who knew?

The very little finished animation is beautiful, very Un-Clampettarian, and unlike anything from the same time period. In a weird way, it reminds me of the awesome and very strange Gene Deitch "Hobbit" animatic that resurfaced recently, in that it's a damn shame that neither of them ever became even a full short film.



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Sketch of the Day!

Have a Tyrannosaurus.

And Then There Was That Time Goofy Adopted a Pet Puppy...

I am suffering a particularly nasty cold this week. It's making me tired all the time (when it isn't giving me insomnia) and I'm feeling pretty darn miserable.

So instead of a longer post where I whine about being sick, or try to form coherent thoughts about Disney movies or dinosaurs or whatever, I am going to share this old Disney animated short I rediscovered recently. In it, Goofy adopts a pet dog. (And not that this would make it better, but note that it is definitely Goofy and not his creepily even more anthropomorphic George Geef persona.)





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Oh hey, what's this (aside from just slightly more content)?



(Yeah, it still looks like "Lost McAvatar - But they're in the Late Cretaceous!")

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Sketch of the Day

I need some cuteness:

Four Lost Disney Shorts

A few very cool Disney animated shorts from recent times and long ago have popped up on Youtube recently. Because of formatting issues, I'm not going to embed these, but they need to be seen fullscreen anyway. Also, I have no idea when Disney's magical lawyers will take them down.

The quality of this video is iffy and it's in two parts, but "John Henry" is readily available through Netflix as part of a DVD collection called "American Legends". The DVD itself is pretty interesting, as it collects four different older Disney shorts based off American tall tales, and they are each introduced by James Earl Jones. It has the feel of one of the old anthology features and the disc was probably designed with classrooms in mind. In any case, the short, directed by Mark Henn, is very nice with an unusual visual style: the artwork is all computer-colored, as with most Disney animation of the era, but the animated figures are clearly drawn in pencil, with a distinctive "sketchy" look.

You may also have to go to Netflix for "Mars and Beyond", which was actually a television special run as an episode of "Disneyland" way back in 1957. It's on the "Treasures: Tomorrowland" collection and whatever you do, don't miss it, as there's some fantastic and unique animation to be seen here. This segment (if I'm lucky, it'll still be up for a while) speculates on what kind of life may have lived on Mars. The Martians essentially look like what Wayne D. Barlowe sees when he closes his eyes. Fantastic creature designs and strange effects highlight this segment.

"Off His Rockers", from 1992 and animated (and I say this with a twinge of sadness) at Disney's old Paris studio, is a very interesting experiment indeed. The short itself is kind of blah: Video games bad, old stuff your parents liked when they were your age good. But the early combination of fully-rendered CGI and cel animation is surprisingly well done for it's time.

I've saved the if-not-best-at-least-the-most-fascinating short for last: "Runaway Brain". The most recent theatrical Mickey Mouse short and made circa 1995, it was originally released along with a far more mediocre Disney film (some sources say "A Kid in King Arthur's Court" [which apparently got a theatrical release somewhere] while others say "Pocahontas" [that would have been something]). Packed with sight-gags and references only a psychotic Disney fan would get (hello), the short plays out more like a vintage Tex Avery cartoon than anything else Disney ever put their names on. It's pretty obvious why Disney buried this short faster than you can blink, but I've seen occasional references to it in everything from "Epic Mickey" to collectable pins to this thing, which, if it weren't so expensive and presumably fragile, I'd hide among the daffodils in my garden posthaste. Bwahaha...

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Art of the Day!

Hey, have I showed you my Pokemon?



This team may be completely different next time I draw them. This is the first time since Red/Blue that I want a team of, like, fourteen.

Florida Trip and Birthday Hangover - Hence, Links of Interest!

Owww... my thing that was my brain but is now leaking out my ears.

Yes, I will admit that I partied a little too hearty. Or hard-y? Anyway, it will take me a while to sort through everything from the trip and write about it at length.

I also had the bad luck to catch something unpleasant from one of the little bratty kids sitting behind me on the plane ride home. (I like kids, but when I am queen, the first new rule will be that airplanes must have special Adults With Young Children and Adults Without Young Children sections. Everyone will be happier because, as a very general rule, little kids *hate* sitting in a tin can, far above the world for hours and hours.)

So in lieu of actual content, here is yet another edition of Links Of Interest!

The most interesting thing going on in the paleoart community is Gregory S. Paul's reaction to (boo, hiss) art thieves. It's understandable, since he's clearly very upset, but also... maybe a little extreme.

The Smithsonian Wild website has recently launched and it is fascinating. Makes me want to set up automated cameras in my backyard.

The Disney Parks Blog shared remarkable footage of the creation of a particularly elaborate Audio-Animatronic character.

O.T.I.S. visited the LaBrea Tar Pits, without a doubt my favorite thing in Los Angeles.

"Rango" is apparently much better than it looks, but it is really, really strange. If you like animated films that are really strange, IndieWire has a pretty good list.

Finally, while we are on the subject of experimental and/or indie animation, Topless Robot had a fantastic overview of the dearly missed "Mtv's Liquid Television". I very definitely remember seeing some of these clips as a child and being freaked the eff out.

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Sketch of the Day!

As you might imagine, it's a little difficult to sketch from a moving vehicle. Nonetheless, I wouldn't give up this sight for all the Audio-Animatronic Yetis in the world:

Oscar Nominated Shorts!

A couple of shorts nominated for Best Animated Feature have thankfully popped up online. I'm going to link to them (rather than embed, because of formatting issues) and share my thoughts. Watch them while you can!

"Madagascar: Carnet De Voyage" - I can't tell what kind of animation is used here and that's a very refreshing thing to be able to say! What I love about this short is the way it captures what it feels like to re-read my old Sketchbooks. Also, Lemurs!!!

"The Gruffalo" - Based off a children's book and aired for an all-too-brief-and-I-am-cursing-myself-out-for-not-alerting-you-dear-readers period on ABC Family during their 25 Days of Christmas. Absolutely delightful with unique character designs and atmospheric animation.

"Let's Pollute!" - The full short isn't available online, but the link goes to a clip and apparently you can download the full short on iTunes. The style is a lot of fun and seems to be a parody of the educational animation produced for "The Wonderful World of Disney" and EPCOT center. (In fact, do I detect a direct dig on the current Universe of Energy?)

"Day and Night" - Needless to say, Disney's lawyers aren't allowing this online. Wah. Then again, since we've pretty much all seen "Toy Story 3", we know how good this is.

"The Lost Thing" - And here is my favorite short of the lot. It made a rainbow in my heart.

I MAY, this is obviously a big "MAY", attempt a live-blog this awards show. In any case, get your drinks ready.

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Great Backyard Bird Count Results!

I did my counting while on what was originally going to be a ski trip this past long weekend. I say "originally" because the weekend was plagued be extreme winds. We did get out and walk around a little but there were very few birds to be observed. The tally below covers Friday afternoon and the entire three-day weekend.

Habitat(s): coniferous woods, agricultural, rural, freshwater

Checklist: Canada Goose, Mallard, Hawk (unknown species), Gull (unknown species), American Crow, Common Raven, White-breasted Nuthatch

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Art of the Day!

It's Hipster Tiktaalik!